As you will know, the foundations for all learning are personal and social skills and communication and language skills. Within the EYFS the social building blocks come under the umbrella term ‘Personal, Social and Emotional Development’. This is further broken down into ‘Making Relationships’, ‘Self Confidence and Self Awareness’ and ‘Managing Feelings and Behaviour.
There are so many opportunities for philosophical enquiry with relation to Personal, Social and Emotional Development. After all, the whole area is subjective and open to personal interpretation. What seems obvious to one child might be a foreign concept to another. By the time a child comes to you at age 3 or 4 they have had all sorts of different input (or lack of input). Children may come from a language rich environment, they may have been at home with a stay at home parent, at a childminder or a nursery. They might live with one, both or none of their parents, they might be an only child or one of many, they could have parents that are young, older or anywhere in between. Maybe English is not their first language or they are on the autistic spectrum. Maybe they are shy or overly confident, caring or lacking in empathy. With children so far ranging in their backgrounds and personalities how can we possibly hope to get them all to the Early Learning Goal in one or two years? It can be frustrating to have a child who achieves in all areas but may not get a ‘Good Level of Development’ (what a soul destroying phrase!) because they have struggled with their social skills. Philosophy is made for areas like this. Not only does it teach the children to follow rules it allows them to question why we need rules. Not only does it show them that they should be helpful but it allows them to explore what helpful means. Remember – the idea of a philosophical question is not to find the ‘right answer’ or the ‘truth’ but rather to allow children to explore concepts for themselves and build on each other’s ideas. This is why you should make an active decision about whether a question is going to be philosophical or not. For example you might have the question “Why do we have rules?” during a carpet time session when setting your class rules. This will not be a philosophical enquiry. In fact this is a definite time for ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers. Why do we need rules about using the scissors? So Katie doesn’t cut Tom’s hair and so Javed doesn’t use our favourite picture book as collage material. You could easily have this as a philosophical enquiry at a different time though, perhaps the week before you set your class rules or during the year when the rules have slipped a bit. The tangents you might take would be to explore what a rule is, what would happen if we didn’t have rules, is it ever ok to break the rules, what is most important; following the rules or doing the right thing, etc. Not all questions can be used for a philosophical enquiry but most can, if rephrased. For some more specific ways to use P4C to support PSED please check out the other PSED entries.
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One common misconception that irritates me to distraction is that Early Years teachers just “play all day”. The phrases “but you don’t have as much planning to do”, “but you don’t have to prepare for SATS” and “it must be so much easier than Key Stage 1 and 2 because you have no marking” fill me with rage. Just ask my husband or children, they have all made the mistake of setting me on this course of ranting in the past.
What upsets and enrages me even more is when these comments come from other educators, educators of older children. Early Years is tough. We are on our feet all day, we have to have eyes in the back of our heads and we do it for the love. We create all of our resources from scratch and do it daily. We redo our learning areas every half term or even more regularly. We deal with children who can’t speak or who are struggling with toilet training and they are all complicated little humans who are only just learning how to be in the world without their parents around. WE WORK HARD! We have just as much planning and assessment, if not more because we cannot assess in ability groups because the children are not yet norming and conforming to detestable Higher/Middle/Lower pigeon holes we are so desperate to place them in. Saying that though… we do have a wonderful time and the fulfilment and enjoyment we get from both the age group and working with Development Matters cannot be topped. The point I am making here (and it is bordering on back tracking) is that we work just as hard as any other teacher BUT these critics are kind of right. We have the one shining benefit in our jobs that we do not have to work with the depressingly rigid and jam packed National Curriculum. There is no requirement for us to have to fit additional lessons like Design Technology, PSHE, foreign languages or music into our weekly planning. We do do all of those things, of course, but in different guises and they are already built into our Development Matters framework. The benefit we have is that our Early Years framework is based on child development and so affords us a lot of flexibility in how we deliver learning. We do work just as hard as other primary teachers BUT we don’t have to cram in specific lessons in specific orders within specific time frames. What this means is that we don’t end up feeling like Philosophy for Children is ‘just another thing I need to squeeze into the day’. Instead it is something we can do as standalone lessons, as part of a topic based lesson or weaved into our everyday learning through play. As we already know, philosophy has been around since the beginning of time. Even without the name ‘philosophy’, humans are natural philosophers. ‘Philosophy for Children’ or P4C is a newer concept.
Although most people will not have heard of P4C or will think of it as a movement in its infancy, it has actually been around for over 40 years and is practiced in over 60 countries. It was first introduced in 1972 in the USA when the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, and in particular Professor Matthew Lipman. This came at a time when educators were becoming more interested in creating critical thinkers, children who could take on opinions and ideas from others and form their own ideas as a result. Lipman believed that children could use their philosophical skills to deal with the process of living and dealing with the future. In our current times and with the speed that technology advances this is even more relevant in education as we now prepare children for careers that do not even exist yet. How can we do that? By creating critical thinkers and independent philosophers. Lipman’s view of the perfect education system was one in which children were encourage to strengthen their power of judgement and one in which we were respectful of their concerns and opinions. An intellectually challenging community of enquiry. He created novels in which the characters had philosophical problems or questions, so as to spark conversation. These were questions with no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Children and teachers were on a level playing field. Everyone’s opinions mattered. To ensure a high level of facilitation the original P4C teachers were engaged by Lipman and were ‘philosophers in residence’ and only then after substantial training. His opinion was that, although philosophy with children should be a flexible and open lesson, it should not be without significant underpinning knowledge and approaches, so as to get the best out of participants. In 1990 the BBC screened a documentary in the UK about Lipman, his team and one of his colleagues called Catherine McCall. The documentary ‘Socrates for Six Year Olds’ looked at the success of P4C in a group of New Jersey schools. It was a big hit. Following over 2000 enquiries the organisation SAPERE (Society for the Advancement of Philosophical Enquiry and Reflection in Education) was set up in 1991 to begin to look at how P4C could more formally be rolled out across schools in the UK. This was a group of individuals, mainly educators, who were either interested in P4C or who had already been teaching P4C in their own classrooms. SAPERE is now a self-reliant charitable organisation who deliver training, create and sell resources and continue to promote P4C throughout the country. Despite initial enthusiasm, P4C had a slow start in the UK, largely contributed to the introduction of the new National Curriculum in 1988 and schools and teachers, particularly in secondary education, still finding their feet with how to timetable the subjects needing to be taught. In 1992, however, a philosopher and educator called Karin Murris wrote a book which created a useful guide to introducing philosophical enquiries using picture books. This book, ‘Teaching Philosophy with Picture Books’, gave teacher guidance, exercises, lists of recommended picture books and a very compelling argument about how picture books are a perfect method of beginning an enquiry. Teachers who tried out these exercises and methods agreed. This was further validated in 1994 by a research project funded by Dyfed County Council in South Wales who found that the approach improved children’s confidence, listening and attention skills and reasoning skills. It became apparent that P4C is a useful tool regardless of the age of the child as long as the stimulus and enquiry are relevant to what is understandable and important to them. P4C is now done in many schools across the UK, however, as is the trend, the teaching of it varies depending on the skill and enthusiasm of the facilitator and the commitment of the school. Those who love it love it, however many teachers find it ‘yet another thing’ that they need to squeeze into their weekly timetable, alongside an ever-increasing pressure and expectation of attainment as dictated by the National Curriculum, Department for Education and Ofsted. Nevertheless, there comes a time to decide on priorities and if P4C can be included in your classroom with a cross-curricular approach then the benefits it offers to enquiring young minds far outweigh the costs. We are particularly lucky in the Early Years because philosophical enquiry and a philosophical approach to pedagogy can be embedded in our everyday life. This is a nice one to end on and, much like metaphysics and ethics, one which sits nicely in the Early Years. Philosophy of aesthetics is all about the arts. It dances through Literacy, Expressive Arts and Design and Physical Development.
It revels in the beauty of life, both the natural world and the man made one. It is all about the creation and appreciation of beauty in all it’s forms and is multisensory. It is equally at home outdoors as you cloud watch, pick up and appreciate autumn leaves, watch a ladybird, wonder at a spider’s web or decide which your favourite flower is; as it is indoors as you listen to music from some of the greatest composers, explore which sort of beat or dance brings you the greatest happiness or most calm and squish your fingers through every texture a typical pre-school messy area has to offer. Here are some ways to introduce the philosophy of aesthetics to your classroom. · Look at three famous paintings. Which do you like best and why? · Listen to different pieces of music. How do they make you feel? · How and why does music make us feel things? · Do you like to listen to music with your eyes closed or open? · What is beauty? It natural beauty or man made beauty the best? · What is the point of ephemeral art? · Are sculptures better than paintings because you can feel them? · Is a painting done by a famous painter more important than a painting done by someone in our class? · Can maths be beautiful? This branch of philosophy is about the law, government and justice. With ethical philosophy the questions are mainly based around the person, either actual or imagined, and their behaviour and responsibilities. With political philosophy there is more of a societal view. It looks at how we behave as a society, being governed by laws.
So with ethical philosophy you might wonder if it is right or wrong to steal if you are hungry. With political philosophy you would look at what a ‘fair’ punishment might be if you got caught doing it. This might work well with a superhero theme or police station role play. Questions could be asked such as; · Why do we have laws/rules? · Who should make the laws/rules? · What should police be allowed to do? · Is prison right? · If you break a law/ do something wrong, what could you do to make it better? · Should the Queen be able to arrest people? · How do the police know they caught the right person? What if they keep saying “it wasn’t me”? · Who should decide if someone should be put in jail? - Who should decide how long they should stay for? For Early Years practitioners this is the easy peasy one. You already do it every day. For philosophical purposes it is the philosophy of right and wrong, of decisions, of justice and personal responsibility. For our purposes it fits well with Personal, Social and Emotional Development and class rules. It also works well for children who struggle with social understanding, for example some people on the autistic spectrum, and with social stories.
Questions which may be asked include; - Is it right to smack someone to stop them from hurting someone else? · Do we have to share? · What is ‘good’ and ‘bad’/ ‘right’ and ‘wrong’? · Do humans matter more than animals? · Do young people matter more than old people? · Should people fight in wars? · If someone leaves a toy on the floor and you tripped over it when you were running (but were told not to), is it their fault or your fault that you fell? · If someone is mean to you is it right to be mean to them? · What is ‘kind’? · Do people always know when they need help? · Can sharks be evil? What does evil mean? · Why is it ok to kill an animal but not a human? · Why is it ok to hit an animal with a stick or kick it but not a human? (horse racing) This branch of philosophy looks at how we can know things are logically correct based on good reasoning. It is a useful branch to tackle things such as fundamentalism or separating fake news from real news. It also helps to prepare pre-teens to navigate the pitfalls of social media.
This branch also works well with mathematics and with reading comprehension (or rather, for our age group, listening to stories, recalling them and being able to infer things from what we have heard and seen). Some questions which may be used in this area are; · If X and Y say that they saw Z do something does that mean that Z really did that thing? · How many different ways can you make 6? (This could mean using number bonds, using items, using fingers, using movements, making it from playdough, etc) · What is a number? · What happened in this book? · From looking at the pictures what can you work out about X character? What do you think they would do if… What makes you think that? · How do you know if someone is telling you the truth? · Is 2 and 2 more always 4? · Is 0 the lowest number? Can you take something away from 0? How can you have less than 0 apples? Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge and justified belief. It is about how we get knowledge, what knowledge is and how we know that beliefs are justified.
This is not an easy branch of philosophy to build into your practice as the questions are usually very abstract and hard to understand. Questions might include things like; · If millions of people believe in something does that make it true/ real? (God, Santa, etc) · How do I learn things? · How long have I known I am a boy/girl? · How long have I known my name? · Do I know things when I am born? · When do I know my mum is my mum? · Do animals know things are real or not real? (people/statues, real grass/fake grass) · If I believe in something does that make it real? For our purposes metaphysical ponderings might go down the lines of thinking about how big the universe is, what stars are made of, what is at the edge of space, where whale come from. Any exploration of nature and the physical world we live in could fit in this category. It is ingrained in our exploration of weather, the seasons and nature, along with our own physical existence. These are the big questions of life, the ones too big for even us to comprehend.
In relation to the Early Years Foundation Stage Framework these questions link well with Understanding the World . You will often find yourself instinctively asking these questions when outdoors. A lot of the time, within your normal role, you will be looking for ‘correct’ answers (Where do butterflies come from? They came from a chrysalis. Before that they were a caterpillar and first an egg) but challenge yourself sometimes to throw these rote learning facts out of the window and allow these questions to follow the train of thought of the child and become more philosophical (as a child my mum thought that moths were made from dust). Here are some metaphysical questions you might want to think about with your children. · What is nothing? · How do I know I am real and not a dream? · What is a dream? What do they mean? · How did the world begin? · Am I always thinking? · Are ghosts real? · Is there a Heaven? What is Heaven like? · What is time? · Are we born good or bad? · What do you think it would be like to be a bird? · Do animals dream? · Do animals think in colour? Do they think in words? · How can you think if you don’t know words? (babies and animals) · Do people who have been blind since birth understand colour? Modern philosophy contains six main branches.
Metaphysics: the nature of reality and the universe. Epistemology: the study of knowledge and how it is acquired. Logic: how to develop valid arguments; includes mathematical logic. Ethics: the study of right and wrong and how people should live. Politics: the study of government, citizen rights and political obligations. Aesthetics: beauty, art and artistic perception. Do you need to know these six branches of philosophy to be able to do philosophy for children? Absolutely not. Do you need to cover all branches of philosophy within the school year? Of course not. You don’t even need to know what branch of philosophy your questions fall into. Philosophy for children should be fun and focussed entirely on what YOU want to get out of it. If knowing the six main branches of modern philosophy helps you to focus yourself on what to ask then you can read more about each branch and some suggestions of EYFS appropriate questions please look in our blog archives. If not then feel free to forget it all and move on. Philosophy for Children draws heavily on the Socratic approach to philosophy so that is what we will look at further. The man, the myth, the legend – Socrates actually did not write any philosophical works himself. What we know of his methods actually comes from the writing of his students, such as Plato. Socrates had a method of enquiry, which he referred to as "elenchus", a cross-examination approach which is now known as the Socratic method. This method basically means questioning and questioning until all possible answers have been eliminated apart from the best one. You know when a child asks ‘Why? But why? But why?’, well this should be evidence enough that a four year old could give Socrates a run for his money.
The Socratic Method looks a little like this; 1. A person makes a statement. You ask them to clarify what they mean. For example, “You should never steal” 2. Ask them for evidence or justification for their opinion “It is wrong to take something that isn’t yours. There is a law against it.” 3. Challenge their assumptions “But sometimes people might need to steal” 4. Find an exception – an example which would mean that the person’s statement isn’t true “What if your family have had no food for a long time and someone has left the last bits of their picnic while they play on the park?” 5. Ask the person to revise their original argument “So do you still think you should NEVER steal? Or did you mean something else by that?” 6. Continue to raise objections or exceptions until the person reaches the closest to a valid statement that they can get This method is so simple that it works with children of all ages. In your work as a facilitator keep the two roles of midwife and gadfly in mind as you encourage children to begin to question the world and coax out all of their prior knowledge and experience of being in order to form some ideas and opinions of their own (midwife) but keep on pushing them to think further (gadfly).
We all use the word ‘philosophy’. It is a word every adult knows. ‘Oh yes, philosophy’, we say knowingly, but how many of us when asked ‘So what is philosophy?’ would be able to answer? Before learning about philosophy my answer would probably have been ‘eerm thinking about things and talking about them?’ which is sort of true but if that was all that philosophy was, we probably wouldn’t even bother with having a word for it would we? According to the Oxford English Dictionary ‘philosophy’ is ‘the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline.’ So…. Thinking about stuff and talking about them then. In a more structured and challenging way than just a chat about what to have for tea though. Philosophy is generally thought to have started in the 6th Century BC in Ancient Greece with the philosopher Thales of Miletus. Like many early philosophers his ponderings were of things that we now understand in a non-philosophical way – science. Other philosophers in this period were Anaximenes, Heraclitus and Anaximander. The majority of their philosophical wonderings and theories were about our very state of being and what the world and the things of the world were made of, changes of state, motion and other (now scientific) realities in the world they saw around them. They did not tend to look too deeply into spirituality or morality, focussing instead on searching for answers with more of a pre-scientific quest for knowledge. Some philosophers paved the way for future scientific enquiries with their ponderings, for example Democritus who taught that the hidden substance in all physical objects consists of different arrangements of atoms and void. These were not scientific findings but philosophical ponderings. These, and other philosophers from this time such as Parmenides, Pythagorus (who believed that the whole world was controlled and could be explained by numbers) and Zeno of Elea, are known as ‘Pre-Socratic’, referring, of course, to one of the most prolific and well- known philosophers, Socrates. So here, already, we see people who do not yet entirely understand mathematics or science yet have an in-built need for questioning the world and finding their own answers. Does that sound familiar? Doesn’t that sound just like a child before the pesky world of adults get a hold of their brain? In the 4th-5th Century along came Socrates and Plato. Socrates took philosophy to a whole new level, pondering not scientific matters of the earth but instead ethical matters of the mind. He cared, not what humans were made of, but how their brains worked and the decisions they made. He used critical reasoning to explore what decisions and morals were right and wrong. His Socratic Method consisted of asking questions, then more questions, then more questions until he found answers which brought him and others closer to an answer than they had been. He saw himself as a ‘midwife’, helping others to grow and give birth to their own ideas and a ‘gadfly’ nipping at and irritating the people he spoke to (and society at large) in order to take them to a higher level of thinking. Socrates was full of questions, feigned ignorance to make others talk, refused to take “just because” as an answer and was more than a bit irritating in his persistence? Well he was just an overgrown 3 year old really wasn’t he? Interestingly Socrates never wrote a word. It is entirely thanks to Plato that we know of his methods and reports of his arguments and questions, though how much is fact and how much is Plato’s dramatization is unclear. Socrates finally annoyed far too many people and was sentenced to death. Plato was Socrates’ student and it was through his writing, and those of another philosopher called Xenophon, that the methods and teachings of Socrates were passed down. Plato also expanded on the study of philosophy to cover issues of metaphysics, logic, ethics, politics, science and aesthetics. Plato also had quite an influential student himself – Aristotle. Philosophy then continued to develop with many, many philosophers introducing their own approaches and beliefs but all with a shared aim – a quest for a knowledge or truth. What Are Philosophical Skills and How Do They Fit With the Characteristics of Effective Learning?4/19/2019 So let us finally get down to the nitty gritty and look at what philosophical skills are and, importantly, what philosophy is. It is important to say at this point that Philosophy for Children is NOT teaching children about philosophy. They do not need to know the works of Plato or even know who Socrates is. They most certainly do not need to know about the different strands or history of philosophy. For your background knowledge I have included some of that information in this website but for the sake of the children – don’t even go there! Rather than being an academic subject Philosophy for Children is a pedagogic approach to teaching (and, if you wanted it to be, parenting). But I am getting ahead of myself. Let us start with the basics. What is ‘philosophy’?
The Philosophy Foundation attempt to explain; “Philosophy is a way of thinking about certain subjects such as ethics, thought, existence, time, meaning and value. That 'way of thinking' involves 4 Rs: responsiveness, reflection, reason and re-evaluation. The aim is to deepen understanding. The hope is that by doing philosophy we learn to think better, to act more wisely, and thereby help to improve the quality of all our lives.” Who wouldn’t want that? An improved quality of life sounds very appealing. So to break that down it seems that philosophy is a ‘way’ of thinking. Not a study of specific philosophers or a deep dive academic research study, but simply a way of thinking – a way of trying to understand the world. Let’s look at a different way of trying to pin down what philosophical skills might be, this time in a child’s world. A philosophical way of thinking supports a child in maintaining focus, showing high levels of fascination, paying attention to details, showing a belief that more effort or a different approach will work, enjoying meeting challenges for their own sake rather than praise, showing curiosity about objects, events and people, using their senses to explore the world, engaging in open ended activities, seeking challenges, taking a risk, learning by trial and error, thinking of ideas, finding new ways to solve problems, making links and noticing patterns in their experience, testing their ideas and changing strategy as needed. A very long sentence but some inspiring ideas eh? Well unfortunately I can’t claim them as my own. In fact I probably should have put them in quotation marks because these are not skills found in the documents of any philosophical society but instead those found in a document most of us use every day, and the savvy of those among you will have spotted them as such. These are the ‘Characteristics of Effective Learning’ that are found in the Department for Education guidance - Development Matters in the Early Years Foundation Stage. For want of a better word, and for anyone not reading as a UK practitioner, this is the closest we get to an Early Years curriculum. It is almost liberating, for anyone hoping to introduce a philosophical thinking approach, therefore to see that this approach fits in so well with what we are already trying to do. How many of the activities that we do every day fit into so many of the different areas of the Characteristics of Effective Learning all at once? Not many! Having looked at that list it should also start to become apparent that a philosophical approach to thinking can help academically in all areas, from literacy and the arts to mathematics and science. These are transferable skills to all areas of life and all areas of academics. SAPERE, the national charity that supports the implementation of Philosophy for Children in the UK, promote Philosophy for Children as helping children to develop their confidence, self-esteem, resilience, teamwork, problem solving skills and the ‘4Cs’ (creativity, critical thinking, collaborative working and caring). Along with promoting these 4Cs in each Philosophy for Children session (something which I will guide you through step by step later in this book) facilitators encourage these skills in every area of the curriculum in addition to having ’Community Guidelines’ (rules or steps to success for the sessions). Gone are the days when we lived in naïve optimism until puberty hit and the only news we got was pretty accurately reported on the BBC. Children are now getting social media accounts from a young age (despite recommended ages of 13). We have even built internet safety and other adult concerns like terrorism into our primary curriculum. Gone are those days where children can just listen to their parents and teachers and get that good grounding of fact-based knowledge before they hit their teens and here are the days that they need to start digesting, processing and forming their own ideas based on a barrage of conflicting opinions.
Life moves fast! For a few years the You Tuber Logan Paul was seen as a ‘safe’ influence. His brother was even a Disney channel regular until the channel “mutually agreed” to separate themselves from him. Skip forwards a few years and Logan Paul’s videos take a turn as they begin to objectify women and, of course, his now infamous and callous visit to the Japanese “suicide forest”. But at what point do the parents of his pre-teen fans decide that he is no longer appropriate? Before his inappropriate turn? Well that isn’t possible, so by the time parents stop their child from watching You Tubers like this, their child has already seen many videos that challenge their way of seeing the world. If the adults around them haven’t given them the skills to take in information and opinions and make considered judgements then children are left being influenced by no-longer safe idols. A sting in the tale to this example, by the way, is that my middle son loved Logan Paul. We bought a Logan Paul hoodie. Then he hit the press for being, in laymen terms, a complete imbecile and that hoodie got consigned to a drawer. We both learnt a valuable lesson there. Another part of the world children are experiencing is the increasing threat of terrorism. When I was young there were definitely still acts of terrorism around the world, but it was not to the scale that we see now and not such a part of a child’s world. It happened. It was in the newspaper, on the radio and on one of the three or four news programmes that were on grown up TV at some point during the day. It did not intrude, too much, into most children’s lives or consciousness. It was a grown-up concern. Children nowadays are experiencing terrorism and gaining an awareness of it from a much younger age. After the bombing of the Arianna Grande concern in Manchester in 2017 four of the children in my class mentioned it during register. This was the next morning. Less than twenty four hours after it had happened. They actually mentioned it as soon as I reached their names in the register and burst out with the tiny bits of information that had already seeped into their little brains. All of a sudden I was faced with four children who knew about the bombing and twenty three children who were now wondering what was being talked about and were eager to hear more. There was an assembly about it too. My class didn’t go, they were far too young for a 20 minute assembly even if it wasn’t on such a sad and scary issue, but their siblings did. Some parents chose to tell their children about the bombing and some didn’t but the children were a part of the world. A world where information comes from all avenues, and where even Disney Channel icons can end up in the midst of a terrorist situation. How can you even hope to explain these things to a three year old? I struggled with my two pre-teens. Not only are the children that we teach now exposed to more videos and news about terrorism, we even actively have PREVENT training for teachers to spot the early signs of extremism and radicalisation that we may see in children. It isn’t just the ISIS style extremism either. In a turbulent society there is also radicalisation coming from the white supremacist front. How can we expect children, who are only just becoming aware of a vague concept of death and whose biggest conflict is usually about not wanting to brush their teeth before bed, to be able to understand and process the existence of terrorism? Philosophy for Children does not give all of the answers but what it does do is help to create a mind-set from a young age which gives children the tools to take in information which is often conflicting (and sometimes fake) and opinions and create their own. That is the key. The opinion and ideas that we all have are exactly that. Our own. So it is up to us to give our children the tools to be able to form their own opinions, taking account of everything they have heard and read, without being overwhelmed or brainwashed by the most vocal opinions. If we create little philosophers then hopefully they can create a positive future for us all. AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. It is a common concern nowadays that, with our fast moving society and social media, children are getting involved in the world of adults from a much younger age.
I worry about it. I have children of my own, all boys. I feel that if I had girls I would worry about it even more. But of course I do have girls. Around fifteen of them in my class every year and I worry about the world we are sending them into, equipped with all of the teaching and, dare I say it, boring lectures that primary school has had to throw at them in the guise of PSHE and ICT and with the hope of giving them some tools to stay safe in life and online but with little in the way of skills like critical thinking, analytical skills, imagining different scenarios and actually making their own decisions. “Don’t trust men in white vans and stay away from strangers” we say. “Don’t go on this app or that one”, “If you are a girl dress conservatively or beware. If you are a boy you are obviously born with no impulse control so this is what you need to remember while you fight those natural urges”. But, of course, none of that is entirely true or vaguely helpful. Bad guys don’t always come in white vans, sometimes they are not even male. Strangers aren’t always bad and the people who might hurt you are not always strangers. This or that app might be dangerous but new ones pop up every day and bad people find new ways to exploit innocence on the internet (and children and teens find new ways to hide things from their parents). Girls who dress a certain way are not “asking for it” and boys are not all born with the urge to hurt people and lack of impulse control. These over generalisations that parents and educators sometimes give in order to try to protect our children, therefore, are bordering on useless when taught in isolation. Yes we should be teaching children what to look out for to stay safe from danger but even we do not know many of the signs until they have been reported on the news and they don’t always get reported in the news until a few terrible incidents have been discovered. In that case teaching facts and assumptions is not enough. In order to help children navigate the world in safety and make the choices that lead them to have a happy and fulfilled life we need to teach them how to make those choices when there are no adults around to ask (or they wouldn’t ask anyway even if one was sitting right next to them). We need to teach them how to think critically and creatively and consider all options and possibilities when making their choices. This is one of the benefits of using P4C in education - to give children those thinking skills to help them to navigate the world. Children are born into this world without preconceptions, without adult logic, with no knowledge of the ‘truth’ or ‘facts’. To children all things are new.
From the minute we sing children a nursery rhyme, read a book or pop on the TV they are presented with talking animals, magic, superheroes who can fly and wizards with magical cloaks that make them invisible. We tell them little white lies about the Tooth Fairy and Santa while telling them not to lie themselves. Perhaps this is hypocritical but Terry Pratchett suggests in his book, The Hogfather, that these fantasy-based lies create an essential way of thinking in children. A way of thinking in which they can learn to suspend disbelief and so later learn about and accept invisible concepts such as justice, love and hope. In a more scientific vein, this helps a child to later accept equally invisible concepts (to a child’s eye at any rate) such as photosynthesis and atoms. The 2017 National Geographic article ‘Why We Lie: The Science Behind Our Deceptive Ways’, claims that children under the age of 6 lie less than any other age group. But these are the age group that get lied to the most. Why? One reason for this is that we adults struggle to explain the big things. You know, those big concepts like death, love, justice and truth. We lie about the things that we don’t think our children are ready to know about and about the things we don’t understand ourselves. Perhaps some of our lies would be better as philosophical introductions. Picture this. A child has a very poorly grandparent. The child asks you, in class, “What will happen to Grandad when he dies?” What do you say? You don’t know what the child’s parents want you to say. Perhaps the child has not even asked them yet. You don’t want to impose your own opinions or over step the mark. You don’t want to devalue their question or feelings by brushing the question off. So what do you do? You turn the child into a philosopher, after all isn’t that what we all are when it comes to trying to comprehend and cope with death? You instinctively say “What do you think happens?” and mentally curse yourself for taking the cowards way out. But is this really a cowardly attempt to not have to answer the question or is it actually giving the child an opportunity to explore what their own thoughts are? When it comes down to it can we really claim that we, educated adults, have any more idea of what happens to our soul after death than a three year old child does? I would say not. In this, and in many other areas, we are as equally all at sea as each other. The child and the adult are both philosophers on the same playing field and in the same league. There are no limits and no constraints in the way a child sees the world until they begin to grow up. That is when we adults make them to learn to live, and think, by the rules. Those depressingly limiting rules of correct and incorrect thinking, of what is a sensible thought and what is a silly one. P4C itself has rules to some extent, in the process and skills used within an enquiry, but there is no rule about what children can and can’t think within the P4C session as long as they are showing respect for each other. So who better to philosophise do you think? A ten-year old who is ploughing towards SATS at a worrying speed with a few years under their belt of learning that answers in class can be right or wrong? The teens who now know there is no Santa or magic, now starting to learn about the scary side of growing up as they work their way through puberty and high school? Or is it the 3 and 4 year olds who still believe that rain is the angels crying, that if you squash a worm it’s mummy will be wondering why it hasn’t come home for lunch yet and that the world was created by a magical frog? (That one came out of my enquiry titled “How was the world made?”) In the Early Years children can maintain the luxury of not worrying that something they say might be ‘silly’ or ‘wrong’ and it is in this silly wrongness that they can really explore the world in a philosophical way and become the inventors and innovators of the future. What would the world be like if adults were still filled with that wonder and those endless imaginary possibilities? Perhaps some of us are. Perhaps that is why we chose Early Years as our home. One of the favourite methods of Socrates was to keep asking ’why?’. I think that maybe he stole this method from a three year old.
I cannot claim to have always liked Philosophy for Children. We have had a bit of a love hate relationship in the past, to be honest. By which I mean that I initially really, really hated it. It took almost a year for that hate to turn into love. When I first sat down in our full day INSET to learn about Philosophy for Children I was at first interested and hopeful. I am a bit of a hippy dippy, quirky earth mother at heart so what better than a fluffy, airy fairy sort of an approach to life than philosophy? We played some good games, I completely loved the theory side of it, and a chance to ask unusual questions and get unusual answers? Count me in. Our trainer has her own Early Years company (I urge you to check out Little Chatters on Facebook) so it seemed like a match made in Heaven. My problems only began because of the necessary rigidity of lesson planning for P4C sessions when you first start out. This was something which I was later able to be more flexible in but, unfortunately, for anyone starting out (and particularly for anyone going for SAPERE accreditation) the rather specific lesson planning is a necessary evil when you first start P4C as it is otherwise very easy to start down a road and end up realising that you went well off track in your session with little benefit and very few skills taught or practiced. From a personal point of view, I see formal, heavily structured lesson plans as the complete antithesis to the Early Years ethos. I got discouraged. My spiritual (and professional) home is in in the pre-school class of the primary school we were sitting and philosophising in. Okay, so philosophy for Key Stage 2 I understood. Brilliant idea. Philosophy for Key Stage 1? Challenging but doable. Philosophy for Early Years? You’re kidding right? Let’s put this in context. My class range from ‘just turned three years old last week’ to ‘just missed out on reception class by a day’ so the very oldest pupils are just short of 48 months old at the start of the school year. The youngest of my pupils are just 36 months old, and I get new starters throughout the year so I ALWAYS have at least one child who is just 36 months old. I have socks older than that. They are still babies in most people’s eyes. Even with every advantage thrown at them, even if they had been privately educated with at home tutoring and came from the actual Royal Family, these children will still only have had 36-47 months of being in the world, never-mind learning to listen to, understand and use the ever-complicated, ever-evolving English language. Very few understand the words ‘why’ and ‘how’ (though they use the word ‘why?’ continually and to distraction). Those who do understand those words are only just learning that the answer to ‘why’ will usually start with ‘because’ and the answer to ‘how’ could be…well... anything! Ask a class of 3 and 4 year olds if they have a question they would like to ask and you will almost definitely be met with a barrage of “I went to Tesco with my mummy”, “I’m getting a Peppa Pig bike for Christmas” or “I like pizza”. If you are lucky enough to prise a question out of a child then it is most likely to be “Can I go to the toilet?” (and even then it is probably just their escape plan because they are bored). So, when first dipping my toe into the Philosophy for Children training and hearing about ‘Ten Step Models’, ‘Community Guidelines’, starter games and questions that even adults struggled with, well you can imagine my thoughts. Those first few Philosophy for Children sessions in my pre-school class were interesting, random and confusing to say the least. But as we became more used to what we were doing my approach to planning became more flexible, I started to get a better knowledge of what would work and what wouldn't. I mean, who would have thought that a group of 3 and 4 year olds would be able to have an amazing philosophical discussion on “How was the world made?” but completely draw a blank when asked “Now that Christmas is over what do you think Father Christmas will be doing for the next year?”. I now know why that one was guaranteed to fail by the way. The first reason was that I did it in January so the children were still fixated on the build up to Christmas and the toys they got. The second was that I completely forgot that 3 and 4 year olds do not actually understand the concept of a ‘year’ yet. After a year of trial and error I came up with my own alternative to the 10 Step Model (a QUESTS model) and all of a sudden P4C became easier and enjoyable and now I am a huge fan of both using P4C for specific enquiries and as a class approach to every day learning. If you check out the list on the side you will find a guide to using the QUESTS model for anyone who would like to try it out. |
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AuthorMiss Magical Mess is a pre-school teacher and P4C Level 2B facilitator. After a shaky start as a P4C facilitator (P4C with 3 year olds... are you kidding?) Miss Magical Mess created her own approach to P4C and enquiry model and is now a big fan. Archives |